Aim and Prerequisites
This TAS aims to beat every level in the FDS release of Super Mario Bros. 2 as fast as possible with Mario. This TAS requires starting from an unclean SRAM state as it expects at least 7 stars on the Title Screen. A verification movie has been created by electricpants and -7 for the purpose of creating an SRAM file with 8 stars on the title screen.
Differences over the SNES release of The Lost Levels.
While the SNES release continues to World A-1 upon completion of 9-4 and makes enemies in the letter worlds similar to the second quest of SMB1, the re-release patches out the "Devil's Spell" exploit by making the bottom two files of the upside-down pipe not enter-able, making some levels like 5-2, 8-1 and C-1, longer than the FDS release. It also handles the timer countdown differently, as it waits for Mario to enter the castle, rather than for Mario to touch a standard block while the star flag object is loaded in memory like the original FDS release. This means if you attempted to perform a "Full Flagpole Glitch" (FFPG) in a level such as 9-1 on the SNES release, you would either softlock the game, such as seen in this clip from Darbian or not gain time over performing a Flagpole Glitch (FPG).
Level-by-level comments
2-1: This uses a trick known as Flag Despawn, found by GTAce99. Unfortunately because of the alignment of the 21-framerule timer it does not save any time over performing a regular FPG.
2-3: This is the second FFPG in the TAS, a massive thank you goes to Kzwbz for helping with manipulating the cheep cheep patterns to allow for this trick to happen.
3-3: This level is one frame away from saving another 21 frames, but unfortunately due to the level design of 3-3 it seems to be impossible to save another frame in this level.
5-2: The first of three wrong-warps, normally you are meant to enter the sideways pipe and wait for the small cutscene of Mario entering the pipe, but using the "Devil's Spell" exploit on the upside-down pipe right near the end of the level allows for you to skip said cutscene.
6-1: One of two FFPG's which rely on the wind to push Mario into the ground, normally the wind would de-load at a certain position but by clipping into the ground before the final staircase and gaining at least an extra 102 pixels from standing in the ground, you are able to use the wind at the staircase to clip into the ground at for the FFPG.
6-3: There is potential for another flag despawn here, which would save another 21 frames if someone was able to find a framerule with the correct pattern alignments.
6-4: Jumping through firebars is used twice in this level, this works because the firebar doesn't rotate cleanly, so it is possible to precisely set up your positioning to jump through the fire bars at the right point of the rotation cycle.
7-1: Performing an FPG and exploiting the screen-wrap trick both get the same framerule, and we thought it'd be more entertaining to see a screen-wrap than another flagpole glitch.
8-1: This wrong-warp works because the memory address which stores the destination area number (0x750) is cleared, the destination page number (0x751) is not cleared between World 7-2 and World 8-1, allowing for a decent chunk of the level to be skipped.
8-4: Because of a podoboo pattern which was unable to be dodged without slowing down to manipulate the pattern, 7 frames were wasted in the first room of 8-4, resulting in this level having 0 frames to spare.
9-4: Normally upon completion of this level the game loops back to 9-1, the only way to return to the title screen is either by resetting or by losing a life. We opted to soft-reset the frame memory address 0x75C (Level Number) is set to 0 (because it is the most reasonable means of considered the level cleared) rather than take the game over as taking damage and waiting on the "You are a super player" screen as taking damage, dying and waiting on that screen is 24 seconds longer than soft-resetting, it also results in enemy different patterns due to the frame counter and framerules being offset.
A-1: A 21-frame improvement over the previous upload by Nobodycallsmetubby. This improvement was previously performed in HappyLee and chatterbox's World A-D warps, Mario TAS.
A-3: Probably the most precise FFPG in this entire TAS, 2 frames had to be lost in the level because you would get a cheep cheep in the way at the of the level when attempting to perform this FFPG.
A-4: This level can lag really badly if you do this grab the wrong way, the previous TAS by Nobodycallsmetubby does a grab which while faster on paper, gets a lag frame. We lost a bit of time in the level to avoid triggering the lag frame and fortunately did not lose the optimal framerule for this level.
B-2: This level is currently 4 frames away from a new framerule, and while I tried to manipulate the Whirlpools to try and save it, it only resulted in one frame being over not manipulating whirlpools at all.
C-1: Another wrong-warp is used here, because of another destination page number scenario, in this case this page number was set in B-4 and would normally take you to the warp zone, the destination page number is set to 0xE, which is the same page as the flagpole and castle in C-1, skipping the entire level.
D-1: The second floor clip utilizing the wind, however this time we do not need to gain an extra 102 pixels to clip into the ground before the flagpole.
D-3: This Bullet Bill Glitch (BBG) is more precise than the one done in the Super Mario Bros, warpless TAS because of the modified bounce height from enemies in 2J and from the enemy being one block higher then the bottom of the flagpole.
Author's notes
web2000
I would like to thank Kzwbz for helping with levels such as 2-3 and D-4 and helped immensely with making the TAS very entertaining to watch, it's been amazing working with him.
Kzwbz
Thanks to web2000 for inviting me to collaborate on this project!
Most of the improvements came from web2000, I only did the entertainment part of the world A-D and some tests.
I regret that I didn't make any improvements for this tas. Nevertheless, I learned a lot from the interaction with her.
By the way, this TAS is 1396 frames faster than Nobodycallmetubby's tas.
Suggested screenshot
nymx: Claiming for judging.